By Illan Baron

Human relationships are complicated because people are complicated, and politics is often complicated for the same reason: we are all complex people with different backgrounds, interests, hang-ups, desires, dislikes and beliefs.  Anyone who has spent even five minutes thinking or talking about Israel, the Arab world, and the Palestinian cause inevitably comes face-to-face with these complexities, the simplifications, the oversimplifications, the value laden judgments and the hopes of what could be.  Regardless of how one chooses to characterize the conflict, the conflict is about human relationships and the ways that people interact and think about other people.

Recently the tragedy that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presented itself in a novel way.  For the first time, images of crying and tearful Israelis were broadcast across the globe as the Israeli state forcibly removed Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip.  The novelty of these images was not that Israelis were shown crying, but that the tears were not tears of grief after a suicide bombing or some explosion in a crowd, but of eviction.  The settlers had to deal with the same type of problem that many Palestinians were faced with not even a generation ago.  Then (in 1947), many Palestinians were also forced to leave their homes, if not directly by eviction, than indirectly by the realities of war.  The evacuation of the Jewish settlers from Gaza was portrayed in the media as an emotional event.  Religious settler families were seen crying, begging and deploring their forced evacuation from homes that they had lived in for twenty and perhaps thirty years.  Soldiers were seen crying, pictures of them are taken as they helped some of the settlers pack, and they were seen forcibly removing settlers who refuse to move.  It was all very emotional and makes for a great news story… and all of a sudden the settlers were seen as human beings, who just want to live in their homes and not have the big bad state take them away.

The human tragedy of this eviction is, however, rather paradoxical.  The settlers demand that the world and that Israel witness the humanity of the settler families because these families are being uprooted and forced out of their homes.  Yet, these same people have been a security menace to Israel for obvious reasons, and have done remarkably little (if anything) to demonstrate their human sympathies to their Palestinian neighbours, and have in fact tended to be highly provocative. Nevertheless, the settler movement all of a sudden cries out for help, demanding that people see their humanity.  But what kind of humanity is this?  The hard-line religious settler ethos is one that rejects the rights of other people; some of its leading religious thinkers even argue that it is okay to kill Palestinians because their blood is not worth as much as Jewish blood.  To be fair, not all the settler community thinks like this, and it is likely that a good many of them just want to live in their homes in peace and quiet, and would be fine being surrounded by the Palestinians if the Palestinians would just leave them alone.  However, what kind of relationship would that be?

The famous and charismatic Israeli general Moshe Dayan recognized the hatred that the Palestinians would feel against the Israelis, and specifically the Israeli settler community.  Dayan, of all people, recognized the human element that is involved in all politics.  What has happened to that humanity?  Or rather, where is the humanity in the political process that overshadows virtually all Jewish/Muslim or Jewish/Arab relation?  Perhaps because of the violence of daily life in Israel and Palestine, a little empathy is required, a little more leeway before taking to task the Israeli public’s opinions and its government’s policies.  For those of us who live outside of Israel and Palestine, it makes a lot of sense to try to come to terms with the problem of living in a conflict zone while trying to end the conflict – not an easy life to be sure.  And because those living in Europe and North America generally live in conditions of peace, it is all too easy for these citizens to make morally righteous demands of the Israeli state or the Palestinian militants: Withdraw!  Stop fighting!  Nowhere has this righteousness been more apparent of late than in the United Kingdom, where the Association of University Tutors (AUT) passed a motion this year to boycott the Israeli universities of Haifa and Bar-Ilan.  The motion has since been overturned; however, the fact that motion existed in the first place and was passed is cause for concern about the judgments made by those not directly involved in the conflict/region.

While not directly related, there is a similarity between the settlers demanding that their humanity be witnessed and the people behind the AUT boycott.  To respect the humanity of the religious settlers seen refusing to leave the settlements in Gaza, one must dehumanize the Palestinians, who, particularly in the Gaza strip, are left to live in horrifying conditions while the settlers live in middle class surroundings.  To respect the intentions of the boycott, one must disregard the arrogance and self-righteousness of the boycott itself and risk dehumanizing the very people that the boycott aims to influence for the better: the Israelis.  In both cases, calls for respecting the rights of some are made at the expense of others.

The boycott of Haifa and Bar-Ilan Universities may have been the product of good intentions, but even the best of intentions can lead to perverse actions.  The boycott was initially designed to target three Israeli Universities.  The third university, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was accused of using Palestinian land for university dormitories.  The AUT was not able to confirm this accusation, and so this university was not included in the boycott.  Nevertheless, targeting Hebrew University is perverse.  Some of Hebrew University’s founders were members of the original peace movement, including Albert Einstein and Martin Buber.  Buber was acutely aware of the need for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace and advocated that they live in a single republican state.

As a union of academics, whose purpose has nothing to do with international conflicts, why would the AUT target Israel?  Why not, as the Observer’s columnist David Aaronovitch asks, target China as well (“Why Israel will always be vilified”, the Observer, Sunday April 24, 2005)?  The answer is simple, because Israel is expected to know better.  Indeed, Israel should know better.  As victims of some of the most horrifying acts of persecution in the history of humankind, Jews should be particularly attuned to acts of violent repression by a state.  However, does it make any sense to specifically target Israel?  All things being equal, it does not make any sense, but as always, things are not equal.  In this case, the problem is that British university academics believe that the state of Israel should act differently from any other state, Britain included.  Because of the historical and collective failure of the Western Christian countries to prevent the violent persecution of Jews which led to Shoah, the citizens of these countries may be projecting onto Israel their collective guilt of not having acted.  Because those in the West failed to allow Jewish refugees entry as they fled Nazi Germany, failed to prevent riots against Jews, failed to prevent pogroms and in fact often encouraged them, the West now assumes that the Jews will learn from the mistakes of their persecutors.  One wishes, I wish, that such learning has been the case, but alas, it has not, and it is wrong to expect others to act better than you have, to act better than one’s society has.

The AUT’s focus on Israel has nothing to do with accurate concerns about human rights and social justice.  It has to do with expectations, but expecting others to act as one thinks they should risks ignoring the humanity of others.  The humanity of the Israeli Jews may be at risk because of the Israeli state’s actions against the Palestinians, but as humans, the Israelis have the right to collectively and responsibly do the best they can to act better.  It is in this regard that others can offer assistance, that others can help, but not by vilifying or ostracizing, which is precisely what the boycott achieves.

The Jewish history of victimhood remains embedded in the Jewish psyche and any positive act of resistance against Israeli policies against the Palestinians needs to be sympathetic to this historical consciousness.  It is not necessary to ask who the real victim is in the conflict, because everybody in the conflict is a victim.  The path for peace is based on Israelis and Palestinians recognizing each other’s humanity, not in pointing out who does what to whom.  It is in this regard that people from outside the region can help.  We need to do at least two things.  First, we need to provide an example.  Second, we need to listen and to engage in positive debate.  Boycotting Israeli academics helps the Israelis to think of themselves as victims when they need to be thinking of themselves as agents of change.  Thus by targeting the Israelis in this manner, the AUT is contributing to the sort of mentality that the boycott is supposedly meant to change.  Furthermore, as an organization of academics, it is vital that the AUT maintains the honour of intellectual freedom, and maintains the rights of others to listen freely and to debate openly.  How does an academic boycott contribute to this fundamental characteristic of academic life?  Academic life is about bringing people together, to listen to each other, to discuss and to debate.  Academics should encourage the fundamental values of academic life to be brought into political life.  Apparently, the AUT thinks otherwise and has decided that political discrimination is preferable.

Unfortunately, the apparent lack of humanity that is all too present in Israel and Palestine spreads into most Israeli and Palestinian protests outside of Israel and Palestine.  The spread of violence and bigotry into the activities of peace-activists is disturbing.  The AUT’s boycott was led by people who consider their political activities in relation to the Israel-Palestinian conflict to be for peace.   In 2002, riots descended on Concordia University in Montreal led by people calling for a Palestinian peace, as if such a peace cannot be an Israeli peace as well.   The occupation of Palestinian land must end, but not at the expense of Israel.  The violence must end, and the discrimination must end, but does it make any sense to expect those who live in perpetual uncertainty to act forgivingly and generously, without prejudice or discrimination, when those who live in comfort seem unable to?